Unit Costs

Our starting position is to keep unit cost at about Tk 260 (£2) Tk 300 (£2.70) per learner. This is ambitious, but we believe it is a realistic starting point for our initial development phase when we expect Nishi to be run only by volunteers working pro bono.

As a rule of thumb organisations which use social energy as its main resource tend to operate at between a twentieth and a thirtieth of the unit costs of more conventional government and NGO organisations This would mean unit costs of Tk 520–780 (£4-6) per learner for Nishi.

In order to achieve our aim of eradicating literacy from Bangladesh we will need to enable about 50m people to become literate. As this is an ambitious aim it has to be matched by ambitious unit costs without compromising quality.